Obtaining Resistance Penetration as a Mage: A very short guide from playing as a mage for a week

I never use magic, i prefer to be a fast melee type. But i trained my air skills all to 80 in an attempt to understand why being a mage is difficult. And Theres only a few short points i can note that drastically improve the mage's ability.

First: If you wanna deal damage, choose a school with available resistance penetration. Alot of stuff in game has high magic resistance and can barely be hurt by most spells. Death, Air, Fire, and Sun offer death resistance debuffs later on once you choose one of them as a specialization. This makes a huge difference in your ability to hurt resistant things. Fire is the highest damage dealing school for mages and has the MOST available resistance debuff of any other school (there is an Evaporate spell that debuffs a single target by -30 fire resistance). Moon, Life, Earth, And water magic are mostly utility and have no options for resistance penetration.

Second: Intelligence is the primary stat for increasing your damage and crits, even for air and earth (air also uses dex to a lesser extent, and earth uses strength to a lesser extent).

Third: Defenses. A small shield and the Deflect skill make a large difference in your defensive ability, and there are shields that dont affect fizzle chance much. Deflect is the first skill in the shield tree and just gettign it to 40 makes all the difference.

I played as an air mage for only a week and tried several different scenes. You need high end skills to reach level 80 in order to aquire specialization skill in a spell tree but for sun, air, death, and fire, it will drastically improve your ability to take on more thigns more easily.

 

Evaporate spell? Do you mean the douse + juxtapose combo?

 

Yes. I have a guildmate that kills dragons usign fire magic and that spell.

I also did a test withy it against obsidian golems, and it transforms them into something nearly unkillable into somethign very killable.

And i believe specialization in air fire death and sun gives the dagaming spells a resistance debuff that stacks up to 3 times for a total of either -15 or -30

 

Water magic does have resistance debuff for mobs. Ice Field gives me -20 Water Resistance base and -25 Water Resistance with a 6-stack(I'm specialized). In addition, Ice Field does a small amount of DoT and slows your opponents. My Ice Arrows can do crits in excess of 500. In addition to the Intelligence Innate, you want to also use Enlightenment(Sun Tree), which gives an INT buff. You can maximize this buff by raising your Sun Attunement. Also, don't forget about the Water Elemental. Mine has healed me for as high as 236hps in one hit. You can further augment your damage with Attunement Gear. There is an INT town buff(think it's Truth), which gives +5 to INT.